[Solved] IPTC Caption line breaks and max length

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matti
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Joined: Sat Dec 31, 2016 12:13 pm

[Solved] IPTC Caption line breaks and max length

Post by matti »

What is the proper way to add line breaks to IPTC Captions?

I have made such Captions in BBEdit and pasted the text in the GC IPTC Caption field. I now noticed that Option-Return allows me to make a line break inside GC, too. Is there any difference in the result? (Using BBedit or some other text editor allows more text-wrangling options).

Is there a maximum character number limit in the IPTC Caption?
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Re: IPTC Caption line breaks and max length

Post by forum_adm »

Yes, just press option-return to get a normal return inside a text field.

The normal return key will execute the default button. That is the normal Apple behavior.

There is nearly no character limit since XMP. Only the old IPTC/ANPA standard did limit the fields. But that limits are now ignored by nearly all implementations.

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matti
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Re: IPTC Caption line breaks and max length

Post by matti »

Sites like Google Photos ignore IPTC Caption linebreaks so as a workaround I have added extra spaces to those spots in case I forget editing the Captions inside Google Photos accordingly.

Off topic: Google Photos was the best free photo publishing site I could find (Apple Photos and Dropbox did not suit my needs):

- No sign-in needed for anonymous users. Any user can download all images for offline viewing. Logged-in users can optionally comment the images. Some users can be granted admin rights to the album. An alert to subscribed users if new images were added to the shared album.

- Google Photos automatically nicely collects all images to a single page and the user can click an image to show them individually (a forced fit to window would be nice but a knowledgeable user can get it via ctrl/cmd+). Arrows/Esc as keyboard shortcuts.

- An option to show/hide IPTC Captions, EXIF dates and location maps while viewing the images.

What Google Photos lacks:

- Search within an album is not possible (can you believe there is a Google product you can't search?!). Search is only possible at the main level and then it is not possible to limit the search to Keywords only.

- Not possible to edit EXIF dates or locations.

- Not possible to show and edit Keywords.

- Edits to the Captions are possible but the edits go only to the database, not to the images. So if a user downloads the image, the Caption might be obsolete.

- Not possible to add non-image content describing the images (.doc, xls, .pdf). I have used Dropbox for this but it is clumsy (I have one image with a speech bubble pointing to the Caption pointing to the Dropbox address).
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